Educational Science

Sex in High School Involves Long Chains of Relations

A study of sexual and romantic relations at a high school found students connected by long chains, rather than in a tight network with a core group of a promiscuous few. Sharing of partners was rare, but many students were indirectly linked through one partner to another and another. The...

Monkeys Pay to See Female Monkey Bottoms

Would you pay to see a monkey's backside? I hope not. Monkeys will, and I guess that's okay, though it sounds awfully close to the sort of thing that lands guys in jail here in the human realm. A new study found that male monkeys will give up their juice...

The construction of highways in northern Ecuador did more than open up access to once-isolated villages. It also created a new network for diarrheal pathogens to travel on, highlighting how human-influenced habitat changes could impact public health, a new study concludes. In 1996, the government of Ecuador started building roads...

New Language Has Surprising Structure

A language in use for just 70 years has evolved quickly and with unexpected structure, researchers said Monday. The Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL) is as an alternative language for a community of about 3,500 people, several of whose members are deaf. It has been in use for three generations,...

Presto! Instant Petrified Wood Created in Lab

Achieving what would take millions of years in only a few days, scientists have drastically sped up the process of petrifying wood. Yongsoon Shin and his colleagues at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have recreated, under laboratory conditions, the conversion of wood into a ceramic, the very process of petrification....

Paul Bunyan Robot Dives For Trees

Sawfish is a real-life robotic underwater lumberjack; it swims down to harvest trees that are now underwater due to flooding to create reservoirs. The Triton Sawfish Underwater Harvester is the world's first viable marine technology for logging underwater forests. It is the only deep water logging machine. Piloted and powered...

Scientists Puzzled by Extreme Penguin Dives

When emperor penguins dive below the Antarctic sea ice in search of food, they can descend five times as deep as a human and can swim on a single breath for up to 20 minutes. Researchers are trying to find out how they manage these incredible feats to potentially help...

Llamas Enlisted to Thwart Biological Weapons

If terrorists ever unleashed a biological weapon, unusual molecules normally found in the blood of llamas could quickly help warn of the attack, scientists now report. Researchers at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington and their colleagues experimented with antibodies, which act as the red flags and magic bullets...

Internet Project Concludes Planet Could Warm by Nearly 20 Degrees

A broad look at possibilities for climate change suggests the planet could heat up much more significantly than other leading studies have predicted. The global temperature could rise between 3.6 and 19.8 degrees Fahrenheit (2-11 Celsius), scientist report in the Jan. 27 issue of the journal Nature. The report is...

Dinosaurs Mingled with Cousins of Ducks and Chickens

Evolutionary cousins of chickens and ducks roamed the Earth with dinosaurs more than 65 millions years ago, according to a new study that runs counter to a key assumption about when birds got their footing on the planet. The newly identified bird species, Vegavis iaai, lived during the Cretaceous period...